Reese Witherspoon's strong performance anchors 'Wild'

By Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Published
5:22 pm EST, Thursday, December 18, 2014

This image released by Fox Searchlight Pictures shows Reese Witherspoon in a scene from the film, "Wild." Witherspoon was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a drama for her role in the film on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014. The 72nd annual Golden Globe awards will air on NBC on Sunday, Jan. 11. (AP Photo/Fox Searchlight Pictures, Anne Marie Fox) ORG XMIT: NYET316 less

This image released by Fox Searchlight Pictures shows Reese Witherspoon in a scene from the film, "Wild." Witherspoon was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a drama for her role in the film on ... more

Photo: Anne Marie Fox

Photo: Anne Marie Fox

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This image released by Fox Searchlight Pictures shows Reese Witherspoon in a scene from the film, "Wild." Witherspoon was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a drama for her role in the film on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014. The 72nd annual Golden Globe awards will air on NBC on Sunday, Jan. 11. (AP Photo/Fox Searchlight Pictures, Anne Marie Fox) ORG XMIT: NYET316 less

This image released by Fox Searchlight Pictures shows Reese Witherspoon in a scene from the film, "Wild." Witherspoon was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a drama for her role in the film on ... more

"Wild" has so many things in its favor that it's tempting to leave out that it's a movie about a hike that sometimes feels like being on a hike, a long one, without many changes of scenery. But the movie's achievement is that it overcomes this. The filmmakers take a potentially plodding, numbing situation and, scene by scene, struggle and succeed in keeping the action alive.

Reese Witherspoon owns this film as few actors ever do. As Cheryl Strayed, a woman who breaks with her own past by hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, Witherspoon is at the center of every scene, with much of the action taking place in her mind, in the form of flashbacks. For Cheryl, the hike is a purification rite, a way of killing the old self and giving birth to the new.

Actually, two women experience a transformation here. For Witherspoon, "Wild" marks the completion of a process she began with "Mud," of moving away from perky wholesomeness. This pensive, reflective, complicated Witherspoon feels more real than the one she left behind — and more in keeping with how she started, in hard-hitting independent movies 20 years ago.

When we meet Cheryl on the trail, she looks like any other outdoors enthusiast, and then flashbacks tell us of someone more turbulent, with a history of heroin use and destructive sexual behavior. Director Jean-Marc Vallee ("Dallas Buyers Club") comes up with something new for these flashbacks, an innovation that simulates how we remember the past.

Vallee handles the flashbacks in three distinct ways. In the first kind of flashback, Vallee replicates a sudden involuntary memory: We see something from the past but hear Cheryl's surroundings in the present. The second kind of flashback suggests a recollection so powerful that it tunes out the present, kind of like the state between waking and dreaming. For that, Vallee shows us something from the past, but in complete silence. The third variety of flashback is total immersion — a visit to the past, as it looked and sounded. In this way, Vallee keeps us in Cheryl's head, in her journey, which is not just physical but spiritual.

Based on the book of the same name by Strayed, the movie doesn't exactly present itself as a survival story. The dangers aren't emphasized, but the risks are there: Hunger, thirst, injury, wild animals. But the biggest threat is other people, namely men, who might take advantage of a woman alone in the middle of nowhere.

On the trail, Cheryl has several encounters with men that are so peculiar in their dynamic that, even if you didn't know this was based on a memoir, you'd guess, because no one would make this up. Over and over, she meets men who actually enjoy that she's afraid of them, and who silently communicate that they could rape her if they wanted to. Somehow — this is what's so crazy — they seem to want credit for this, perhaps even a reward for not doing it. And the reward they implicitly want is (you guessed it) sex.

Laura Dern appears in the memory scenes as Cheryl's mother, a cheerful woman supporting two kids with no help from anyone. Dern is a ray of light in the movie, and she succeeds in making something look easy that isn't easy at all. She makes goodness — pure, unalloyed, genuine niceness — interesting.

Few who see "Wild" will come away wishing it were any longer. But by presenting the dangers, by creating the sense of being alone in a tent listening to the animals howling, and by gradually revealing the importance and function of Cheryl's trial by fire, the movie leaves viewers with a feeling of arrival. For some reason, this woman needed to do this, and she did it.